Hells Canyon

Hells Canyon (map),
is the spectacular canyon of the Snake River — deepest in North America,
averaging about a mile from rim to river — that forms the border between Idaho
to the east and Oregon and Washington to the west. Much of the canyon is in
public ownership. Hells Canyon National Recreation Area encompasses 652,488
acres, including 214,000 acres of wilderness. Hells Canyon itself is about 71
miles long and 10 miles wide, on average, and in places the distance from the
tops of the highest peaks bordering the canyon to the river is nearly 8,000
feet.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, Hells Canyon was something of a battleground over efforts
to build hydropower dams for economic development, on the one hand, and to
protect wild spaces, fish, and wildlife, on the other. At the center of this
public debate were questions about how to develop the hydropower potential of
the substantial annual volume of the Snake River in Hells Canyon; how to
preserve the scenic canyon for public recreation; and how to protect salmon and
steelhead that passed through or spawned in the canyon. These fish had economic
importance in the region and, for Indian tribes, a cultural importance.

Salmon and steelhead

The Pacific Fishery Management Council has estimated that prior to 1850, when
Euro-American people began to settle in the Northwest, the Snake River Basin
produced about 1.4 million Chinook, 200,000 coho and 150,000 sockeye annually.
Steelhead numbers are harder to estimate, but one researcher estimated in 1970
that steelhead habitat existed throughout the Columbia Basin at a ratio of about
1.7 to 1 compared to coho habitat. Thus, the Snake Basin probably produced about
340,000 adult steelhead per year, an estimate based on the estimated abundance
of coho. Based on the Pacific Council’s estimate of salmon and steelhead
production in the entire Columbia Basin, this means that the Snake produced 41
percent of all Chinook salmon, 16 percent of all coho, 16 percent of all
steelhead, and 23 percent of all sockeye. Expressed another way, Peter Hassemer,
an Idaho Department of Fish and Game biologist, wrote in 1992 that before the
Federal Columbia River Power System in the Snake and Columbia rivers was
completed in the mid-1970s, the Snake River produced about 40 percent of the
adult spring Chinook salmon, 45 percent of the adult summer Chinook salmon and
55 percent of the summer steelhead that returned from the ocean each year to
spawn.

Salmon and steelhead spawned in numerous Snake River tributaries, and fall
Chinook salmon spawned in the mainstem of the river including in Hells Canyon
and farther upstream. The Clearwater, which enters the Snake at Lewiston, Idaho,
downstream of Hells Canyon, and the Salmon in Idaho and Imnaha in Oregon, which
enter the Snake within the canyon, supported strong populations of salmon and
steelhead. There was an important Indian fishery at the mouth of Asotin Creek,
just south of present-day Clarkston, Washington, and tribal fishers journeyed
from the desert plains of southern Idaho to fish for salmon and steelhead in
Snake River tributaries in the mountains of central Idaho. Salmon and steelhead
spawned in the Snake River Basin as far upriver as Shoshone Falls, some 300
miles above Hells Canyon.

As non-Indian farmers and miners steadily populated the region in the mid to
late 1800s, salmon and steelhead provided an important food source and, for
many, a source of income. At the headwaters of the Salmon River, 6,000 feet and
more above sea level, there was talk about a salmon cannery, and men sold salmon
and steelhead to the mining camps. Over the mountains to the south, at Payette
Lake, the headwaters of the Payette River, commercial fishers salted and packed
as many as 75,000 sockeye per year in the 1870s. A resident of the area
commented in the journal of the United States Fish Commission in 1895 that the
runs, which were declining at the time, once had been so thick that he sometimes
had to shoo the salmon away before his horse would cross the river.

By 1888 the commercial salmon catch at Payette Lake had declined substantially,
perhaps as the result of overfishing in the lower Columbia River, which also was
taking a toll on salmon and steelhead populations that spawned in other parts of
the Columbia River Basin. Tributary dams, like Black Canyon Dam, completed in
1924 on the Payette, impacted many of Idaho’s salmon and steelhead populations.
Black Canyon Dam, like many others built in that era, lacked fish-passage
facilities and resulted in the loss of the only Sockeye salmon population that
existed upstream of Hells Canyon. Other human activities in the spawning areas,
such as mining and farming, also took a toll on water quality and spawning
habitat.

Hydropower

Beginning in the 1930s, the hydropower potential of the Columbia River Basin
began to be developed in earnest. Rock Island, completed in 1933, the first dam
across the mainstem Columbia, was not a federal project, but subsequent big dams
were — Bonneville (1938), Grand Coulee (1941), McNary (1953), and Chief Joseph
(1955), for example. By the 1950s, though, the Eisenhower administration sought
to reduce the role of the federal government in power projects. And so it was
not surprising that a battle erupted over who should construct a big hydropower
dam in Hells Canyon: the federal government or a private business. In 1949 the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a water development plan for the Columbia
River Basin that included a series of low, run-of-the-river dams in the lower
Snake River and a high dam in Hells Canyon. The high dam would regulate river
flows downstream to optimize hydropower generation at the lower dams, similar to
the way Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia regulates flows and power production at
federal and non-federal run-of-the-river dams downstream.

Meanwhile in the 1940s, Idaho Power Company also saw the hydroelectric potential
of the Snake River in Hells Canyon. In 1947, two years before the Corps issued
its plan and one year before the federal Interior Department issued its own
proposal for new dams in the Columbia River Basin, Idaho Power applied to the
Federal Power Commission for a license to build the three-dam Hells Canyon
Complex. The Commission, forerunner of today’s Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission, issued a license to Idaho Power in August 1955. The first of the
three dams, Brownlee, was completed in 1958.

Idaho Power’s eight-year journey through the licensing process did not cool the
interest of others in competing to build the high dam. There were two competing
proposals, and either would have impounded a reservoir stretching more than 50
miles upriver to Brownlee Dam.

One, called High Mountain Sheep Dam, was proposed by the Pacific Northwest Power
Company, a consortium of four private power companies. Pacific Northwest Power
filed its license application in March 1958. The dam, planned to be 670 feet
tall, would have been built about one mile upstream from the mouth of the Salmon
River. The reservoir would have been 58 miles long. The other, called Nez Perce
Dam, was proposed by the Washington Public Power Supply System, an agency that
represented a number of publicly owned electric utilities in that state (this is
the same entity that took on the task of building five nuclear power plants in
Washington in the 1970s. See Hydro-Thermal Power Program). Nez Perce Dam would
have been even taller — 700 feet. It would have been built at a site just
downstream from the mouth of the Salmon River, and thus would have wiped out
anadromous fish runs to the Salmon River and its tributaries. Meanwhile, the
federal Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers argued that any new,
high dam should be built by the federal government as part of a federal water
development plan for the lower Snake and Columbia rivers.

After a lengthy review of the competing proposals, the Federal Power Commission
issued a license for High Mountain Sheep Dam to Northwest Power in February
1964, despite objections by the federal Department of the Interior and citizen
groups that formed in opposition to the dam. Litigation followed.

It was an unusual lawsuit — the Department of Interior suing the Federal Power
Commission — but the Interior Department feared the environmental impacts of the
dam, particularly on salmon and steelhead, and challenged the license on these
grounds even though the Federal Power Commission noted in its order granting the
license that “. . . Any power development would adversely affect the fish and
wildlife resources of the area, and particularly the anadromous fish … [M]easures
for the conservation of those resources could and would be taken, and . . .
about $5,000,000 would be required for the fishery program.”

The license was upheld by an appeals court, but overturned in the U.S. Supreme
Court in an historic decision written by Justice William O. Douglas. The Supreme
Court ordered the Federal Power Commission to reconsider the application;
Douglas interpreted the Federal Power Act, the authority for issuing the
license, to require the consideration of alternatives to federal development —
including no development. According to the opinion (Udall v. Federal Power
Commission, 387 U.S. 428), Section 10 of the Federal Power Act provides that a
project licensed by the Commission shall be “…such as in the judgment of the
Commission will be best adapted to a comprehensive plan for improving or
developing a waterway . . . and for other beneficial public uses, including
recreational purposes.” Douglas wrote:

The objective of protecting ‘recreational uses’ means more than that the
reservoir created by the dam will be the best one possible or practical from a
recreational viewpoint. . . . The importance of salmon and steelhead in our
outdoor life as well as in commerce is so great that there certainly comes a
time when their destruction might necessitate a halt in so-called ‘improvement’
or ‘development’ of waterways. The destruction of anadromous fish in our western
waterways is so notorious that we cannot believe that Congress through the
present Act authorized their ultimate demise. . . The test is whether the
project will be in the public interest. And that determination can be made only
after an exploration of all issues. . . including future power demand and
supply, alternate sources of power, the public interest in preserving reaches of
wild rivers and wilderness areas, the preservation of anadromous fish for
commercial and recreational purposes, and the protection of wildlife.

Douglas held that the commission also must consider “the need to destroy the
river as a waterway, the desirability of its demise.”

It was the fight over High Mountain Sheep Dam that led Congress to create the
Hells Canyon Wilderness within the larger Hells Canyon National Recreation Area,
in 1975. The fight over the high dams in Hells Canyon was significant in the
history of conservation, author Tim Palmer writes, because the Supreme Court
addressed the damage the dam would cause to fish, wildlife and recreation in
Hells Canyon and directed the Federal Power Commission to deny dam licenses when
doing so would serve a larger public interest.

The Hells Canyon Complex

It is difficult to say today how many salmon spawned upstream of the Hells
Canyon Complex historically, but fish counts at the Brownlee and Oxbow dams
between 1958 and 1960 probably give some indication, although the numbers could
have been higher 100 years earlier. At the time, the maximum counts were
approximately 17,000 fall Chinook in 1958, 2,600 spring Chinook in 1960 and
4,500 steelhead in 1959 and 1960. Sockeye were extirpated with construction of
Black Canyon Dam in 1924. There were no coho upstream of Hells Canyon
historically.

The resolution of the High Mountain Sheep Dam litigation and the subsequent
failure of the high-dam proposals cleared the way for Idaho Power to construct
the other two dams in its three-dam Hells Canyon Complex. Brownlee, at Snake
River mile 285, had been completed in 1958 and began generating power the
following year. Oxbow, 12 miles downstream at Snake River mile 273, was
completed in 1961, and Hells Canyon, 26 miles downstream from Oxbow at River
Mile 247, was completed in 1967. None has fish passage, but fish passage was in
the original plans.

Article 34 of the Hells Canyon Complex license required Idaho Power to make
$250,000 available to study the fish runs and determine how to mitigate losses
that would be caused by the dams. In response, state and federal fishery
agencies reviewed all known means of mitigation, including passage, relocation
of the runs, artificial propagation, and natural redistribution of fish in
streams downstream of the complex. Of these, passage appeared most promising and
also held out the promise of restoring salmon to their historic spawning areas.

In 1956, the year construction began at Brownlee, the Idaho Department of Fish
and Game and the U.S. Department of the Interior sent letters to Idaho Power
requesting fish passage facilities for both upstream- and downstream-migrating
fish at the Hells Canyon Complex. The same year, the Secretary of the Interior
sent a studies program and budget to the Federal Power Commission, and the next
month the Commission authorized Idaho Power to spend the set-aside $250,000 on
the studies.

Construction began immediately on temporary upstream adult passage facilities at
Brownlee. A fish trap using an electric barrier to guide fish to the trap was
completed in December 1957. This trap was soon replaced by an adult trap at the
Oxbow Dam construction site downstream in May 1958.

While state and federal fish and wildlife agencies pressured Idaho Power and the
Federal Power Commission to provide fish passage at the dams, the agencies also
made clear that this policy position assumed that protective devices and
procedures would be experimental. Unfortunately, the fast pace of dam
construction was too fast for investigations that may have provided more
information about the efficacy of fish passage. Other forms of mitigation
remained under consideration, but these were problematic. For example,
hatcheries were dismissed because the initial review of mitigation options
revealed water temperature and siting problems in Hells Canyon that would make
fish production difficult. Despite the fact that hatcheries had been operating
in the Columbia River Basin for more than 70 years, including, for example, the
successful hatcheries in the upper Columbia built as mitigation in the 1940s for
Grand Coulee Dam, the Fish Commission of Oregon and the Oregon State Game
Commission worried about whether hatcheries could maintain large runs of salmon
and steelhead, particularly those in the Snake River. In comments prepared for
the Hydroelectric Commission of Oregon in 1956 regarding permits for the Hells
Canyon dams, the two agencies wrote that:

. . .maintenance of large runs of summer-run steelhead and spring Chinook salmon
by means of artificial propagation is not feasible in light of present
knowledge. This is due to the unique life history of these fish, which brings
them into the rivers months before their spawning time and which requires a
year’s residency in freshwater prior to their journey to the sea.

Hatcheries, if anything, were considered a fallback option. Artificial spawning
and incubation channels also were considered, but again, these had proven
problematic elsewhere. Channels had been built at McNary, Priest Rapids, Rocky
Reach, and Wells dams on the Columbia. While similar channels had been
successful in Canada, it was nothing more than speculation that they might work
in Hells Canyon, and they had not been particularly successful to date in the
Columbia. Idaho Power also considered whether the runs should be relocated, as
was done with the upper Columbia runs affected by Grand Coulee. Translocation
was an intriguing concept, but there was no way to know whether it would work.
Biologists lacked critically important information on the life histories of the
Snake River stocks and their ability to adapt to conditions in tributaries where
they might be relocated.

So the focus of the Article 34 effort remained on fish passage. Events outside
of Idaho Power’s control added to the complexity of the challenge. How to
provide fish passage at the Hells Canyon Complex depended on whether either of
the high dams proposed for construction downstream would be built. Given their
height, it is likely that neither would have had fish passage facilities, and
this would have changed the fish-passage effort at the Hells Canyon Complex. As
early as 1951, Idaho Power was considering ladders for adult fish passage at the
Hells Canyon Complex, and by 1954 the company was investigating whether fish
ladders or fish elevators would work best. But if either of the high dams were
built, fish ladders would be useless. By 1958, when Pacific Northwest Power
filed its license application for the High Mountain Sheep Dam, Idaho Power had
decided that best option for the Hells Canyon Complex would be trapping and
hauling the fish as opposed to constructing fish ladders or fish elevators.

And that is what happened. Adult fish returning upriver would be trapped at the
face of the first dam — fish traps moved downstream progressively as the three
dams were completed — and then hauled to release points above the dams. In fact,
adult spring Chinook and steelhead were trapped and hauled successfully to a
release point about a mile above Brownlee from 1956 to 1964.

While passage of adult fish was successful, passage of juvenile fish migrating
downstream was not. How and where to collect juvenile fish at Brownlee was a
matter of intense discussions among Idaho Power and state and federal fishery
agencies.

The Fish Commission of Oregon, for example, preferred that juvenile fish be
collected at the surface in the Brownlee Dam forebay and that the dam’s turbine
entrances be located 120 feet below the surface in order to prevent juvenile
fish from passing through the turbines. This would have allowed the fish to be
collected at the surface using outlet pumps, as it was believed that the fish
would not dive 120 feet to go around the dam. However, because of a requirement
by the Corps of Engineers for Brownlee Reservoir to provide flood control with a
potential flood-control drawdown of 101 feet, the turbine outlets would have
been required to be 220 feet deep. This would have required a different design
to the dam — concrete as opposed to rock fill dam, and that design would have
been more expensive. Idaho Power planned the turbine entrances to be only 16
feet below the surface at the minimum reservoir elevation. This design required
a different means of collecting fish than originally envisioned by the fish
management agencies.

The solution proposed by Idaho Power and ultimately adopted with some
reservation by state and federal fishery agencies was to install a plastic mesh
barrier net across the reservoir that would extend to a depth of 120 feet with
another 20 feet of net extending horizontally upstream from the bottom of the
net. The net would be suspended from pontoons and anchored to large concrete
abutments on each bank a mile upstream from the dam. The barrier net would guide
fish to collection points on the surface, and the fish then would be trucked to
release sites downstream of the dam. As each successive dam was built, the fish
could either be trucked to a point below the lowest dam or released into the
pools between dams.

Idaho Power and the fish agencies explored various collection and transportation
alternatives. Returning adult fish would be trapped at the lowest dam and
released above the upstream dam or dams. Again, there were multiple options,
including releases into creeks that flowed into the pool behind Oxbow Dam and
releases into streams above Brownlee in both Oregon and Idaho. But the success
of any option depended on the success of the juvenile collection system and, in
particular, the enormous barrier net.

The net didn’t work as planned. It was installed in 1958, and within a year,
state fish and wildlife personnel began to speculate publicly that it, and the
associated juvenile fish-collection and trucking facilities, would fail.
Periodic inspections by divers found the net sound in places but failing in
others. Parts of the net hung in the water at odd angles as the river current
pushed and pulled. In short, the net did not guide fish well. Many fish
apparently passed under the net or through it. As a result, more fish went
through the Brownlee turbines than had been anticipated. Juvenile fish survival,
as measured by marking fish upstream of the dam and recovering them at the
barrier net or at the dam, declined.

In hindsight, there were other problems for juvenile fish in Brownlee Reservoir
that probably affected survival as much as the failing barrier net system.
Brownlee Reservoir was large, slow-moving and, particularly in summer, warm.
Juvenile fish apparently became disoriented and had difficulty finding their way
through the reservoir. Wastes from sugar and potato processing plants upriver,
fertilizers that ran off of fields into the reservoir, and algae blooms combined
to reduce the oxygen content of the water. By August of most years, low levels
of dissolved oxygen and warm surface water temperatures forced fish to live
within a narrow band in the water column.

Faced with fish-collection and water quality problems, the fish agencies
recommended developing a plan to mitigate the impacts of the complex by building
hatcheries downstream from Hells Canyon Dam. In August 1960, Idaho Power first
discussed abandoning the fish passage facilities and using hatcheries to
compensate for the losses. The first hatchery was proposed for construction at
Oxbow Dam. The previous month, July 1960, Milo Moore of the Washington
Department of Fisheries reported the barrier net was not working and that the
fish runs in Hells Canyon “are being badly mauled by inadequate facilities.” He
proposed a program of hatchery production. Later, in November 1960, Moore
reported: “the Brownlee-Oxbow facilities have failed. To continue putting a
major portion of the anadromous fish runs above this project for study purposes
is tragic.” The federal Interior Department did not agree, however, and advised
against abandoning fish passage, but by 1962 it was apparent the barrier net
concept never would work. Plans were under way to convert fall Chinook
mitigation efforts to hatchery production and to relocate spring Chinook and
steelhead stocks to tributaries downstream of Hells Canyon Dam.

Some interests continued to argue for fish passage, including the Idaho Wildlife
Federation, which issued a statement to that effect in July 1963. Idaho Power
responded with a letter that stated, in part, “Fisheries agency people are
already agreed that fish passage of fall Chinook (the most abundant species in
the Brownlee Dam complex area) should be discontinued in favor of below-dam
artificial spawning and rearing facilities.” Two years later, in June 1965, the
Oregon Fish Commission issued a statement suggesting that passage be
re-established if a better means of collecting and passing the downstream
migrants could be developed at Brownlee.

But the steady failure of fish passage facilities, and the pace of dam-building
in Hells Canyon, supported the positions of Idaho Power and others who believed
that artificial production would provide the surest, quickest and most effective
mitigation.

In December 1963, the Federal Power Commission ordered Idaho Power to abandon
the barrier net collection system at Brownlee and purchase land in the lower
Rapid River, a tributary of the Salmon River, for a hatchery. By August 1965,
the fish and wildlife agencies had decided in favor of hatcheries and expressed
their decision in a document entitled, “Policy for the perpetuation and
management of anadromous fish in Snake River drainage upstream of Salmon River.”
The policy left open the option of re-establishing fish runs above the dams:

If determined by the agencies that the fish runs will be re-established, upriver
production areas now blocked by existing dams or currently rendered unusable
because of other water uses shall be made accessible and/or productive as early
as possible through the provision of passage facilities, pollution abatement and
releases of water from storage to augment quantities and improve qualities of
the flows to satisfy migration, spawning, incubation and rearing requirements.

In January 1966, the Federal Power Commission ordered Idaho Power to limit its
mitigation efforts to artificial production. It may seem remarkable to some
people today that more effort didn’t go into fish passage in Hells Canyon, but
the decision needs to be understood in the context of the time. Biologist Don
Chapman, a longtime observer of fish policies in Idaho, wrote a history of the
Hells Canyon complex of three dams for Idaho Power Company as part of its
application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to relicense the
project. In his history, Chapman says the key issues for state and regional
decision-makers in the late 1950s were development, energy for economic growth
and the question of whether dams would be built by public or private interests.
The two decades after World War II were “the last years relatively unfettered by
legislation designed to protect natural, aquatic and terrestrial communities and
habitats,” he writes. They were, in his opinion, “the last in the 200-year march
toward manifest destiny in resource exploitation.”

At the time, ecological understanding was “relatively primitive,” Chapman wrote.
Mechanistic scientific research had only begun, and knowledge of fish genetics,
behavior, and ecology was limited, at best. “In short,” Chapman wrote, “the
mid-1950s were not conducive to regulators being able to ignore the societal
forces that insisted on development at a rapid pace.”

And the pace of development was rapid, indeed. The Federal Power Commission
issued the permit for construction of Brownlee Dam in August 1955; from that
date to closure of the spillway gates in May 1958, when the reservoir began to
fill, was just 33 months. Even with the fast track, the scant knowledge about
anadromous fish, and the available mitigation tools, would have made fish
passage at the dams impractical. Eventually, Idaho Power built four hatcheries:
Oxbow, Rapid River, Niagara Springs, and Pahsimeroi. In 1980, Idaho Power, the
states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, and the National Marine Fisheries
Service, signed a settlement agreement providing that the hatchery program
together with agreed-upon fish-production numbers constituted full and complete
mitigation for all numerical losses of salmon and steelhead caused by the
construction and operation of the project.

In 2003, Idaho Power filed an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission (FERC) to relicense the three dams. The existing license expired in
2005, and the company is seeking a new, 30-year license. The dams provide more
than two-thirds of the hydroelectricity the company sells.

In anticipation of the relicensing, American Rivers and Idaho Rivers United
filed a petition to compel FERC to initiate ESA consultation on the ongoing
operation of the Hells Canyon Project in advance of relicensing. FERC delayed
its response to the petition and the issue eventually ended up before the U.S.
Court of Appeals, which instructed FERC to respond to the petition. FERC
responded, and subsequently Idaho Power entered into an interim agreement with
various parties, including American Rivers and Idaho Rivers United, on
operations pending relicensing. Separate filings with FERC addressed
fish-passage studies.

By 2006, FERC had completed a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Hells
Canyon Complex relicensing. Public hearings were conducted in September.

In its license application, Idaho Power proposed to develop actions and measures
to restore passage and habitat for bull trout, but not for salmon or steelhead,
concluding that in most tributaries above the Hells Canyon complex, 1) other
dams would preclude passage, and 2) land use practices have degraded habitat and
water quality to the point of precluding successful reintroduction.

After reviewing comments, FERC will issue a Final Environmental Impact Statement
that will establish guidelines for issuing a new license for the project. FERC
expects to issue a new license by the end of 2007. FERC licenses are issued for
a term of 30 to 50 years.